Boost Soda, the Original Take a Boost Drink of New Jersey

A Living Record of Boost! and America's Regional Sodas

This site is a heritage archive built around Boost soda, the non-carbonated cola-style syrup that pharmacist Benjamin Faunce began mixing behind a Riverside counter around 1905. What began as one of several house-made remedies grew into a take a boost habit that a single corner of Burlington County has kept alive for more than a century. The drink was never marketed nationally, never chased a supermarket shelf, and never quite disappeared, an outcome rare enough that it is worth documenting in full rather than letting it fade into local memory.

The archive treats Boost soda as the doorway into a much larger story: the American regional soda. Before national bottlers flattened the map, the economics of heavy glass and short shipping ranges meant nearly every region grew its own drink. Detroit had its aged ginger ale, the Carolinas their cherry cola, New England its bitter tonic, and New Jersey its flat, dark take a boost drink. Those local bottles are catalogued here across three linked resources, each drawing on the same underlying records.

The vanished sodas database tracks discontinued and surviving brands alike, with a source for every entry. The regional soda map plots a signature drink for each state, from Boost in New Jersey outward. The Boost timeline and the Soda Time Machine place the whole story in chronological order, so a visitor can see what was on the shelves in any given year and what had just poured its last.

Everything here is written in a plain, factual voice, because the goal is a reliable record rather than a sales pitch, nothing on this site is for sale. Where a fact can be sourced it is; where a brand's history is thin, the entry says as much rather than inventing detail. The result is a reference that treats a small New Jersey soda with the same care usually reserved for the national names, and uses it to hold open a door onto a vanishing corner of American food history.

Boost soda earns that central place for a simple reason: it is a near-perfect specimen of the regional soda in its purest form. It was invented locally, sold locally, and kept local for more than a hundred years, surviving without the two things that usually decide a drink's fate, a national marketing budget and a decision to grow. Most sodas either scale up or fade out; the take a boost drink did neither. Reading its story next to the dozens of brands that rose fast and vanished, or spread wide and lost their character, makes the point clearer than any argument could. That contrast is what this archive exists to preserve, and why a single New Jersey jug is worth a site of its own.